When the London riots kicked off in 2011, Daniel Mayrit was living in Tottenham, and he witnessed violent events on his doorstep. A few months later, he received a police leaflet in the post featuring faces of the alleged participants, taken from CCTV cameras, which asked neighbours to help identify them. At the same time, banks were being bailed out and financial scandals were rolling out in the press.

“On the one hand we had the petty thieves that maybe had stolen a TV in the supermarket, and on the other those responsible for the financial crisis,” says Mayrit. “The difference was that in one case we got their images delivered to our homes, in the other we had no idea who they were or what they looked like. There was a representation vacuum, and I wanted to put faces on them the way that power puts faces on criminals.”

Mayrit worked to fill that space. The Spanish photographer tracked down the 100 most powerful people in the City of London (according to Square Mile’s 2014 report) and, after trying to photograph them directly – going to their places of work, or finding out about events they would attend – he gave up and resorted to the internet instead. He carefully selected images that were already in the public domain (in the press, YouTube, and footage from parliamentary appearances) and gave them a treatment that made them look like screenshots from security cameras.

His motivation? Without representation, there can be no action. “It’s very difficult to point your indignation towards something if you don’t even know its face.”

The resulting photobook, You Haven’t Seen Their Faces, questions how presentation can change narratives. “We could not possibly know if the youngsters portrayed by the police were actually criminals,” Mayrit says on his website. “We almost inadvertently assume their guilt because they have been ‘caught on CCTV’.” Likewise, he says, “we cannot assume either that the individuals featured here are all involved in the ongoing financial scandals.”

His book, which won the Paris Photo First Photobook award and is featured in Martin Parr’s Strange and Familiar show, currently on at London’s Barbican Gallery, features photocopies of the faces printed on brown paper and bound together by three golden screws. Mayrit overlays handwritten texts on each face giving information about their earnings, scandals or legal cases they’ve been involved in – all of it information that had already been published by established media.

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With editor Verónica Fieiras, he was looking to spark “a sort of physical reaction”. So they included a map that identifies these people and their workplaces. “We wanted for the book to allow readers to take action if they wanted, for them to really use it.”

Meanwhile, in his Suburban Scenes project, Mayrit staged daily anodyne scenes with actors in Tottenham and retouched the shots to give them a Google Street View look. “I wanted to question how those images were interpreted by the viewer, depending on what they knew about Tottenham. They could all be read in one way or its opposite – like this kid jumping a fence: had he just stolen something, or was he taking a shortcut to the shopping centre?”

Despite the activist slant of his art, Mayrit is sceptical that images can change the world: “After Vietnam, their power is relatively small, and I’m infinitely aware of that.” However, he is tackling something that bothers him: “Photographers always seem to focus on the victims, in any type of conflict.”. He wanted to do the opposite: “What about those responsible for it?”

Spending months working on closeups of these faces, “obsessing about getting the right look” affected Mayrit. “I felt like they were part of my life, like I knew them – they felt like the neighbour you see every morning.” But the more he researched, the more he realised that he – and we – are clueless about real life in the City of London. In one particular case, number 71 in the power 100 – he could not even find a photo of the subject, Jonathan Sorrell. “Some of these people have so much power that they’ve managed for their image not to be on the internet. It felt like a metaphor for the whole project.”

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Mayrit is one of a growing number of photographers turning their cameras on the wealthy. Dougie Wallace takes garish portraits of customers outside Harrods; Italian duo Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti photograph tax havens around the world; Zed Nelson visually explores the cost of gentrification in London. In Points of Authority, Thalia Galanopoulou photographed bankers going about their daily business: “Some of them have given me consent, but most of them were just passing by,” says Galanopoulou of her gonzo approach. “I always made myself visible, as I used a 50mm lens. I didn’t want to be hiding … I think this confrontation is an important element.”

No reactions from the City have, as of yet, reached Mayrit, who draws a parallel between the isolation of the financial and art sectors: “Both are a niche. Most people in them don’t really care about what goes on outside of their worlds.”

He is now working on a project around Spain’s controversial “gagging law”, which prohibits the dissemination of pictures of police forces. “They are also trying to create a representation vacuum,” he says of the legislation. “The financial system had a moral vacuum; this is creating a vacuum by law.”